


Babylon

by Accidentallytechohazardous



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, F/M, Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, Mind Manipulation, Monsters, Nonbinary Character, Other, Spiders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 16:23:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6202450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Accidentallytechohazardous/pseuds/Accidentallytechohazardous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shuuhei Hisagi, our hard-boiled antihero, steals a biscotti, gets involved in a fistfight with some sports dads, and harasses a fountain. Also there’s some stuff about monsters and exactly how gray can gray morality get before it’s just straight up being a dick?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Babylon

**Author's Note:**

> I'm supposed to be working on the next part of Witch AU and in the meantime I created a new verse??

It is not a dark and cold night in a bad part of town. It’s early evening, about six-ish, and the weather has been decent for a change, which people agree upon cordially at the crosswalk over cups of coffee. It’s not even true dusk yet. It’s an inkling of dark, with watered down colors painting the sidewalks and the buildings and the shadows of people on their way home from work.

People even make eye-contact with Shuuhei when he passes by them, as if doing him the courtesy of ignoring his less than professional appearance. A businessman in a disheveled ironwall suit gives him a condescending smile like ‘you wild kid, you’, which Shuuhei can’t really find it in himself to be offended about. It’s a harmless mistake to make.

His shoulder brushes past Shuuhei’s when they pass each other on the sidewalk, the outwards seam of his jacket just barely grazing Shuuhei’s army-green coat, and Shuuhei figures the guy has bigger problems to worry about.

He can see it like a grainy photograph. The businessman’s wife’s pursed lips, back from the hairdresser with her hair curled so tight it’s like tense animal ready to pounce because that’s the way her husband likes it, is always telling her she should take pride in her appearance, criticizing her for her weight, her clothes, the aging lines on her face that deepen every year she’s tied into this family. Meanwhile the husband’s wedding ring collects dust in the key bowl and he pretends not to notice his wife and neighbors’ judgemental eyes on his back. They won’t stay quiet for long.

Shuuhei reaches out at the last minute to absently pat the man’s shoulder, which startles him in a fumbling of wingtips and flailing briefcase, and says with absolutely no sympathy. “That divorce is gonna a real nail-biter.”

-

One black eye and a biscotti at the local fair-trade cafe later.

“I warned you. Did I not warn you?”

“Someone had to say it. The idiot’s still got his secretary’s panties in his briefcase.” Shuuhei says, raising his hand to touch the bruised flesh of his eye. The skin is all tender, and even though he doesn’t register any pain from a weak punch he’s still vaguely annoyed because this was his last good eye. They don’t grow on trees. Underneath his fingertips, blood begins tosimmer. The bruise ages from a hearty plum to a decomposing yellow-green.

“You’ve never been good at dealing with people.” Rangiku says chipperly and sits down at his corner booth. She sets her purse on the table, it’s the same coal-black as her pressed blazer and pencil skirt. With a spread of her arms against the back of the pleather, she sinks regally into the seat. She’s a bright face of sunshine wrapped in cold steel. “Using your powers only makes you fussy.”

Maybe ‘fussy’ is one word for it. As usual, her criticism of him cuts deeper than it should, and he poorly disguises this by glowering at the wall. “I don’t ‘use’ them, Rangiku. They don’t turn off and on for me.”

“Oh, goodness. It’s such a burden to always be in on people’s secrets, picking apart their lies. Being in the advantage of every negotiation.” She has a cakepop in one hand from the counter that disappears between the gnashing of her teeth. Her eyes roll under long lashes like he bores her. “It’s not exactly thrilling for everyone else, you know. Knowing you’re always gonna be there, watching and judging.”

“I’m not judging.” Did she come here just to berate him? Seems extra, even for Rangiku. Shuuhei’s eye looks at her from under his bangs, hangdog, and his gaze rolls over her neck. Sometimes she wears the brooch he gave her over a hundred years ago, the kind of expensive and glittery deal she used to like, but more often than that she doesn’t.

She’s not wearing any jewelry at all today- purely business. Nails the color of poison dart frogs and red velvet scrape over the table to almost place her hand over his, then she thinks better of it at the last minute. Her smile is the softest thing Shuuhei has felt since coming to town, and she smells like white tea. “You’re always judging, Shuuhei. It’s not something you know how to turn off.”

These conversations are always lovely. Shuuhei glares at his hand, the one that was almost caught under her’s, and suddenly realizes it’s too early to be tired. “How long have you been following me, Rangiku?”

Her grin widens, lips parting to reveal two enormous incisors. The whites of her eyes flicker like a mirage when she leans over the table, and those nails knick the shell of his ear with surprising sharpness as she plucks something small and hairy from the underside of his jacket collar. He has to resist recoiling from her touch. Shuuhei has seen enough of Rangiku’s sins in person, he doesn’t have to live through each one montage-style.

“I don’t need to follow.” She says bluntly, letting the quarter-sized spider dance across her knuckles like a well-trained pet. Shuuhei, despite himself, feels his spine stiffen and the hair on the back of his neck rise. “You might say that I-”

“Don’t do it.”

“‘Bugged’ you-”

“It’s not a bug.”

“I wish you’d hurry up and fake a sense of humor as well as you fake a human form.” Rangiku giggles and deposits the spider into her purse. Now that Shuuhei thinks about it, that bag sure sounds a lot more… wriggly and scratchy than he thought.

It’s not that Shuuhei isn’t used to Rangiku. It’s actually quite the opposite- she was one of his first friends, much to her chagrin. Though back then he was impressively naive (read: stupid) about her true nature. Some idyllic and self-absorbed part of him was certain he could change her ways, that the years spent trying to court her were not obviously in vain.

These days he marvels at how much he would have overlooked about Rangiku. Even her pets, which came to cover and consume everything that she owned, started to look endearing to him. Their frothing pinchers looked like big, goofy buck teeth up close. Their busy little legs danced delicately up a pale arm to cross the valley of a rounded shoulder. Whether the shoulder belonged to their master, or to the food she had caught for them.

Shuuhei still remembers fashionable townhouses, ritzy little rent-controlled apartments build over hairdressers or yoga studios that he would have to enter through the back of to find the stairs. Using Rangiku’s spare key to open her door and push aside the cottony net of webbing sewn to the corners of the wall like a tapestry, an original work of art she would surely berate him for destroying later. A flock of black dots crawling away from under his feet and retreating into the body-sized pillars swinging from the ceiling. Each one snuggly wrapped in a sheath of web like a swaddled baby, tenderly swinging from the rafters.

“That’s a fire-hazard.” Shuuhei would grumble, trying to shake off the creepy-crawly feeling he got seeing the inside of her place.

Rangiku would pretend not to notice he had spoken and ask him if he wanted lunch. Picking up one of the bodies over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and giving him that same sunny, venomous smile and singing-song voice. “This one is fresh.”

In that respect, not a lot has changed. Only her apartments aren’t one-bedroom anymore and she leases warehouses in the meat-packing districts, and Shuuhei should warn her that upgrading might not be the best idea when a fuckton of bodies are involved, but she wouldn’t listen and that hasn’t changed much either. She’ll tell him that times are changing. That it’s a brave new world. Whatever it is she believes.

Today, in the coffee shop, Rangiku draws Shuuhei’s attention back to the present with her soft eyes going sharp. “Shuuhei.” She chews on the destroyed stick of her cakepop, leaving the white cardboard soaked in blood-red lipstick. “I need you to run a little errand for me.”

Shuuhei dusts biscotti crumbs off of his shirt as an excuse move. “Oh?”

“We’re not on opposite sides here. We never were.” Rangiku says, She folds one hand into a fist and squeezes the knuckles. Thinking carefully about what to say. Thinking about how to speak to Shuuhei without explicitly lying. “For people like us to live here, we’ve got to keep the peace.”

Whatever that means. As much as Shuuhei likes Rangiku, the possibility of listening to her give him reasons why she’s an innocent bystander on this wild, fucked-up roller coaster called life makes his eye unfocus in boredom. “What?”

“You like it when everyone stays in their corner, Shuuhei.” Rangiku pushes, her voice drips with honey and heroism. Noir actresses studying for their role of the damsel in distress pleading with hard-boiled detectives could have taken notes. He’s not the first to fall for her lures. “Monsters can’t go around attracting too much attention, otherwise the humans start to catch on and get suspicious. And some monsters like their new penthouse with a cute little bakery around the corner so much, it’d be such a pain in the ass to have to rip up the whole nice little town.”

Yeah, Shuuhei bets it would really put a dent in her weekend plans. He scratches his neck and feels heat like hot knives prickling the inside of his skin under his nails. If anything is amiss, Rangiku would be the first to know about it. Every inch of the city is connected to her fingertips.

“I’ll check up on them.” He finally concedes, his gaze wandering up to the rafters and away from the woman in front of him. It’s foolish to agree to anything Rangiku offers, even if she’s at least partially correct. And like magic, as soon as Shuuhei says those words the look of delicate desperation evaporates off of Rangiku’s face in a broad Cheshire grin.

For the barest second, Shuuhei’s powers kick in without his permission again, piercing through the illusion and he doesn’t see a beautiful woman anymore. The image flashes from gorgeous businesslady to her true form like a mirage or a glitch in the matrix. He sees his own glare reflected back to him eightfold in the shiny black buttons of Rangiku’s eyes, distorted and mutilated like watching himself sucked into the center of a black hole.

“I knew you were the perfect person to talk to! I feel so much better.” Rangiku says chipperly as she stands up, the top of her head nearly brushing the ceiling. She picks up her purse in an arm that splits apart into columns of wiry cartilage and bristly hairs. She gives him one final, fang-bitten smile, lips peeled far too, wide apart before strolling to the front door to the machine-gun march of her graceful legs.

Shuuhei leans back into the polyester and foam, blocking out the imaginary feeling of ghostly little legs creeping up his spine and across his neck. The desire to scratch and claw at something invisible under his skin that strikes him as uncomfortably human.

On his way out, he stops by the counter to tip the barista. A dollar flutters into the jar, which is welded to the counter, along with the body, by fine threads the color of snow powder. The corpse’s skin is ashen, suctioned to the skeleton, sunken and lifeless eyes staring out of the webbed prison directly at Shuuhei.

A slew of curses roll across Shuuhei’s brain, lips curling into a frown and rooting behind the counter for another biscotti to make himself feel better. ‘Keeping the peace’ indeed.

-

It goes without saying that tracking a monster down isn’t easy, particularly in a densely packed cities and metropolitan neighborhoods. Anything suspicious or unsightly gets swept out of the way, and all of the clues go along with them.

That is the curse of human convenience. In order to make everyone happy, some people have to stop being counted. Every milk carton with a missing person on them will end up in a landfill eventually. That is the element which makes this possible, the ability to not be a person but be a background character in a world in which there are no main characters. No protagonists or antagonists. No ultimate struggle between good and evil.

But alright, Shuuhei is looking a little too deeply into this. Speaking of the ultimate struggle between good and evil, Shuuhei’s rust-bitten and off-white wreck of a car narrowly avoids scraping against a barbecue dad’s shiny black volvo in the parking lot.

He hates sports bars like these, where he walks in and his eye is immediately assaulted by fluorescent light and the blaring feedback of thirteen different sports channels on at the same time. Shuuhei recieves a warm and worryingly genuine smile from a waitress carrying baskets of hot wings the color of new highlighters to crowds of single thirty-somethings, former high school varsity members who come here to get out of the office and try to reclaim their youth in beer and table pool. Shuuhei looks substantially too young, too alone, and too unemployed to enjoy himself here.

A foot from the podium that asks Shuuhei to wait to be seated, be becomes aware of a young man with a name tag approaching him from the side with a laminated menu, hand raised as if to tap Shuuhei’s shoulder. Since Shuuhei doesn’t really have any interest in being forced to read this kid’s mind, he turns around first, “Hey-”

The waiter’s fist collides with Shuuhei’s nose with alarming force, swung from the shoulder and Shuuhei stumbles backwards from the sheer shock, knocking over someone’s dinner of burgers and cokes.

The waiter wraps his hand around his fist, veins popping in his head and arms braced over his head to smash down on Shuuhei’s head. At the last minute, a strike from an empty beer bottle against his skull has him crumpling to the floor in a mess of blood in his hair and on the linoleum. The woman at the bar holding the bottle in her white-knuckled fist then has her face smashed into the bar by the customer sitting next to her, who gets whipped across his spine by a pool cue by one of the college kids at the game tables.

The room dissolves into a stage of chaos, a crowd of hands reaching for something to tear and smash. Glasses shatters from every corner of the restaurant and ketchup bottles go sailing through the air. Shuuhei has seen wars, massacres of the most savage degree, but it’s a unique kind of absurdity to see a petite woman savagely employ the tv that bad been discussing extreme golf scores as a blunt force weapon for no given reason.

Shuuhei rises quickly, shaking splinters and french fries out of his hair to avoid pool balls as projectiles. This was messy, and cruel, and couldn’t last very long, his gaze searches over the warzone to the distant corner where there is the least destruction.

Renji Abarai moves like an enormous lizard, something heavy and ancient, lazily sticking into the shadows. Their outrageously gangly legs are nearly at the back exit by the time Shuuhei is ducking, rolling, dodging blind blows in an obstacle course of violence. A shot glass explodes next to Shuuhei’s head and scrapes a line of his face right off, and Shuuhei feels his anger boil over in time with inky smoke pouring out of the cut.

His hand is a claw in Renji’s sleeve, nearly ripping apart their stupid jacket with the shiny silver buttons to yank them backwards, though even his noteworthy strength doesn’t go a lot against the monster’s bulky shape. “Turn it off!”

“I’m not making them do anything.” Renji says with a self-satisfied smirk that deserves to be ripped off of them and broken into pieces. Somewhere behind Shuuhei’s back, an indiscreet scream of pain wears on Shuuhei’s already thin patience.

“That’s bullshit.” And this time Shuuhei’s hand is grabbing the collar of Renji’s shirt, dangerously close to their throat. Something dark and writhing moves around in the pit of Shuuhei’s stomach. A warning. His skin feels tight. “Trust me, Renji- you know there’s no one you want to do this with less than me.”

It’s… there have been better lines. There have been more calm and collected threats. But that is the risk he has to run into when dealing with Renji Abarai. Even now as Shuuhei tries to reign in his temper, he can’t stop himself. Renji is at once both stiff and boneless in his grip, more like they don’t really care about being here at all, and their eyes flash from beady and black to flashing fire-red under flashing tinted glasses. When they speak through a grating grin, Shuuhei has a vivid fantasy of shoving a knife into their stomach and twisting. “You goin’ my way, mister?”

Cold air hits Shuuhei’s face and his lungs burn. Tension and rage melt off of his bones as soon as they step outside, leaving the hot clusterfuck of whatever Renji has done behind them. Though the mood inside the building seems to have changed, too. The sounds of shattering and destruction seem to halt like a switch being flipped off, leaving only a cloud of eerie confusion and blood-smeared windows.

Inside Shuuhei’s car, Renji tries to turn on the AC only for Shuuhei to slap their hand away and roll the windows halfway down. Renji snorts with their chin propped up on their elbow innocently, and Shuuhei’s eyes narrow straight ahead out the windshield.

“So,” Renji drawls while Shuuhei meticulously checks his mirrors. “Whatd’ya want-”

The car backs up roughly, jerking, and Renji cusses as their head knocks against the back of the seat. Shuuhei cannot find it in himself to care even the smallest bit. “What the hell was that back there? You suddenly think you’re Aizen or something?”

“I was havin’ a fucking meal is what I was doing? What’s your problem?” Renji barks, lips curled up high around pink gums. “Nobody was gonna get killed. I don’t make people do nothing they didn’t wanna do in the first place.”

“Right. Nothing they didn’t wanna do.” Shuuhei hastily pulls out and gets onto the road as the sound of police sirens grow into a distant wail. “You only traumatized at least fifty people, but yeah I bet your conscious is as clean as a whistle.”

Renji pulls out a pack of cigarettes from their coat pocket, but Shuuhei slaps that out of their hands too. They seem unphased by this and summon a matchbook, placing one of the wooden ends between their teeth and grinding down canines. “That’s human nature, dude. Vengeance, spite, hatred- everybody’s angry. It’s in their DNA. Sooner or later there’s gotta be a release or it just pops.”

“Mhmm. You’re practically a therapist.” Shuuhei grumbles, then swerves to avoid nearly being rear-ended by someone blaring their horn at him. The driver appears to be an eighty-year old woman in a volkswagen. Not your typical road-rage suspect. “Shit! I told you to knock it off!”

“I did! Sometimes it just takes a while to cool down.” Renji admits, and Shuuhei can verify. Even with the windows down, Renji reeks like sweat, blood, and violence. Their proximity makes Shuuhei edgy, like he can’t trust himself. He’s not a violent person.

But that’s always the way it is around Renji. Shuuhei, along with everyone else, finds a part of himself he didn’t want to find. And Renji just walks away unscathed. Every time.

Renji yawns and Shuuhei pulls onto the highway, watching the speedometer bounce on the dashboard. “Who sent you? Rangiku?” His silence is unfortunate testimony. “You fuckin’ call me manipulative.”

“How often are you pulling shit like this, Renji? You think this is funny? Somebody’s gonna catch you and cut your head off.”

“Only when I need t’ eat. You know if I’m hungry I won’t be able t’ keep my trim figure.” Renji points out and kicks their feet up onto the dashboard. Trying to force Shuuhei to decide if he’s rather be dealing with the humanesque Renji or the reptilian nightmare sitting under their skin. “Just cuz’ you don’t have to worry about that, being locked up into that meatsuit-”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I can change form anytime I want.” Shuuhei’s knuckles tighten around the steering wheel. The scenery blurs around the car and bends like liquid. Shuuhei’s beating heart is a heavy chunk of brimstone in his throat. “Don’t make me consider it.”

He has no idea if Renji will take that seriously- how much Renji takes anything seriously. Creatures like Renji feed off of that kind of thing. Emotional energy, personal drama and broken promises are Incubis bread and butter, only Renji doesn’t go for things in the typical way. There is no ‘happy ending’ where they are involved, and that’s how Renji likes it.

Their eyes flick up and down Shuuhei’s form again, an unimpressed scowl. “You wanna tell me where you’re taking me?”

“Your apartment.” Shuuhei answers.

“I moved, idiot. You know I can’t stay in one place too long.”

“I found your address. This is exactly what I mean.” Shuuhei chooses his words carefully, because speaking around Renji is difficult. You can never be sure what you’ll end up saying. “You think that leaving behind a mess makes you invisible, but it doesn’t. It just leaves behind a trail of destruction that leads right to your doorstep. You know how easy it is to google shit like ‘mass hysteria outbreak’?”

“Holy shit, you really do miss being the morality police, don’t you?”

Renji’s voice is haughty, their boots getting mud all over Shuuhei’s semi-clean dashboard and the sound of an engine groaning for relief is in Shuuhei’s ears.

“Rangiku wants t’ have you chasing everyone around so she can build her shitty… fuckin’… ‘revolution’ or whatever she thinks is going to happen for monsters.”

“You could have killed somebody.”

“You seen the statistics on heart-failures? Hamburgers kill these people.” Renji scoffs dryly. “You wanna think you can make a difference so badly, don’t you?”

He’s not. Shuuhei knows he’s not. It didn’t matter what he did before and it didn’t matter now. But Renji’s voice is making that desire to hurt something all the more pleasant to review in his head. Replaying the images of burning empires. An army desolated at his feet. That’s what hate felt like, and it felt like love.

Renji’s powers- they’re not in their voice. It’s all just pheromones and biology, but Shuuhei tastes something in that voice nevertheless. Something like pity. “They’re not gonna take you back, Shuuhei. You’re better off down here anyways with th’ rest of us monsters.”

Shuuhei breathes, deathly calm. “You really don’t see the downside of using your powers on just anybody, huh?”

Which is the last thing Shuuhei gets out before he swerves off of the road, and in the darkness the ground disappears from under the tires.

-

At this point, Shuuhei would like to reiterate- he did not want to crash his beloved car, which had been his only reliable mode of transportation for quite a while. Only that in that moment, between his blood boiling and the surge of adrenaline like grit between his teeth, driving off the shoulder and into a river was phenomenally preferable to carrying on a conversation with Renji.  

He shouldn’t say that. Renji is like Rangiku. They’re his friend. Sometimes they even mean well, if providing Shuuhei with company happens to align with their own self-interest. Hell, back when Renji used to collect their meal of other creatures’ life-forces in the traditional way, Shuuhei considered himself a willing donor.

All he asked is for one night where they were people and not creatures. Renji even wore the skirt that Shuuhei liked, hands sliding over thighs and teeth ripping apart a throat. It wasn’t as if Shuuhei didn’t have more than enough life to give. It wasn’t like he had a soul to lose.

Under the icy and filthy river that’s probably more sewage from the city than it was water, Shuuhei’s shape is an oil slick. He is shapeless, formless, bodiless, a hundred arms reaching out and burning the water into pure and holy steam. Above the water and into the air his one eye sees in all directions, left and right and up and down and backwards and forwards and forever.

Shuuhei steps onto the land without feet or weight, one mass of void squeezing into a dimension it doesn’t belong. His halo, like a crown of thorns, ignites the air. A sigh like a church organ burns it’s way out of his throat. Growing his corporeal body back was such a hassle.

Not too far away down the bank, another shape crawls up onto the land and the mud. Renji’s huge tail slithers and thrashes in furious red and gold, their scales reflecting brilliant under the sheen of water and pollution.

Shuuhei approaches on toes of dark matter to confirm that they’re a mess, mane dripping wet and plastered to their scaly skin and around their horns. Renji wretches and curses in a hundred different languages, each one precedingly vulgar, through a misshapen mouth with row of circular, toothy knives like  tapeworm. It truly is no wonder Renji has to keep draining people of their energy to keep their human form- this shape is rather pitiful.

“Fuck you.” Renji must be able to feel his judgement, or more likely how easy it would be for even a powerful creature such as them to die at this moment. Their gangly arms with bones cutting out at the elbows and wrists raise to cover their face. “Go back t’ regular.” No mortal, monster or human, should look an Angel in the eye. Not if they have an inkling of what’s good for them.

It’s a drag, now. Shuuhei likes the feeling of the air on his skin, even if it means having to be aware of the earth spinning underneath him every second of every day. Of space and time peeling apart and becoming vivid hallucinations. But he’ll squeeze himself back into the suit of skin and bones and muscle and blood. This murky soup contained within the fine walls of a body.

The hundred gnarled, perfect, heavenly hands become two, boney and brown and human. This face that has burned heretics and sinners alike no longer kills on sight. And Shuuhei pulls Renji up out of the water with their serpentine tail draped around his human shoulders, clinging to his human torso.

“Is that a little better?” Shuuhei asks, spirits significantly raised, as Renji presses their disfigured face into his neck and breathes a hot and hateful growl.

“Hate you.”

-

It’s the final stop that takes the longest. No high-rise fortress of trendy shopping districts. No thick musk of repressed violence and and energy. It’s also a hell of an expensive cab ride, given than Shuuhei’s car is at the bottom of a river. He wants to blame Renji, but tha’ts all on himself.

Shuuhei is down to counting singles in the cab, which he’s sure is thrilling for his driver. Most of his money went to getting all ten feet of Renji home safely. Turns out the majority of companies from the city won’t take him out this far.

There’s lush green here, which is jarring to Shuuhei even though it’s only in skimpy patched blocked between white bricks. The elevated ground of small cemeteries loom over the sidewalk, putting the dead at eye-level to the suburban houses across the street. Shuuhei observes a quaint playground that’s still wet from melting snow. This is the kind of town no one’s heard of until a writer who grew up here puts it on the map. The kind with white fences painted by hand. He can’t tell if it feels so genuine that it has to be fake, or if he’s just disgustingly cliched kind of jaded.

It’s probably both, but anyways.  

Nobody is out right now because everyone is tucking their kids into bed, getting ready for the PTA meeting, hanging out with their pets or whatever normal folk do during the night. Shuuhei’s boots crush gravel on the park dirt road. He almost misses the constant sounds of the city. This is eerie and silent.

Everything in the picnic area is lonely and gray, stained by years of weathering because nothing really changes in a quaint little family place like this. Shuuhei drops his coat on a gray picnic table, sitting on the shallow wall of the gray fountain that sits in the center of the gray clearing.

“I dunno why you like this place.” Shuuhei admits, kicking up one leg and taking care not to upset the decaying flower beds, the only thing growing there being fossilized weeds. Three cherubs wearing Homeowner Association-approved figleaves pour out water into the basin of the fountain. It gurgles, even though having an active fountain is still long out of season.

Shuuhei rubs the back of his neck, feeling as though Rangiku’s spiders may have snuck along for the ride under his shirt collar. Carrying on a one-sided conversation has never been enlightening for him, even if he made a habit of it after Izuru’s death.

Shuuhei’s gloved hand pinches the bridge of his nose. This was more grueling than trying to find Momo out in the beaches. “I wish you’d just give me something to work with.”

“I don’t know what it is you’re looking for.” Izuru’s canned voice sounds like it’s a ten feet underground, though Shuuhei doesn’t have to look up to see those watery blue eyes and stony face. Dark spots like water damage and decomposition wear down on his skeletal frame.

Izuru’s clothes sag heavy on his body, like they’re waterlogged. “You need to stop doing Rangiku’s favors.”

“Will you be incredibly surprised to learn that Abarai said the same thing to me?”

“Well, if Abarai and I both agree on something I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t listen.” Izuru’s voice is dry and deep as granite, it scrapes over Shuuhei’s ears. His muddy sneakers knock together. “You’re very hard on them, you know. Matsumoto and Abarai, I mean.”

Shuuhei pretends not to consider this, counting the pennies in Izuru’s fountain by flashes of white gold and moldy brown. “Yeah, people in glass houses, etcetera.”  

“Are you here because you’re going to tell me to leave?” Izuru’s lips are turned in a dispassionate frown, thin and dry. His face is dark and smooth like riverstone. “I don’t go around eating people. I just live here.”

Izuru’s sneakers scuff the barren and wet earth, Shuuhei notices the grass by his toes is brown. Simply a result of the fading winter? By the time spring came around, it had better be lush and green and vibrant. But it probably won’t be.

Shuuhei rubs the heel of his hand into his eyes. “Is that what you said about the last town?”

Izuru’s voice echoes from the bowels of the fountain, clanging and reverberating deep within the pipes. It sounds disappointed, which is Izuru’s version of irritated. “A question for you this time; do you have nothing better to do than try to micromanage how many gardens I soil?”

“You are an infestation.” Shuuhei says sharply, something tight pulling at his jaw and around his eyes. He twists so that he can face Izuru with his body, legs folded underneath him. “You’ll start from here and work your roots into the entire town, draining it of it’s life one person at a time. Just like the last one.”

Izuru’s face is unchanged, tight lips sealed while his words come from behind Shuuhei’s head. “I love your hobby of talking too much about things I already know, but you ought to look at the bigger picture for once.”

“Rangiku.” Shuuhei sighs, his hand drifts upwards and nails comb through his hair.

“She doesn’t care how many times you berate me- or anyone else, for that matter.”

“Even if I wanted to get on her case, she’s keeping every other monster on their best behavior. Without her, I don’t know if the power vacuum would be any better.” He could take out Rangiku and get fifty Renjis. It’s not a fair trade, and it sure doesn’t benefit everyone else. Local politics give him a headache.

Izuru’s fingers are like ice, long and chilly and dead. It draws goosebumps across his skin, down his neck. This form feels temperatures, hot and cold, though the being he is inside doesn’t register such mortal sensations. Physical senses are for the vulgar and short-lived.

Through Izuru’s touch, Shuuhei sees thirty years go by, little villages bleeding away into ghost towns. Izuru’s roots reaching through the earth, hungry and hungrier. Setting in under trees, buildings, houses. A few years later and even this place will be off the map, wiped out and lifeless. Shuuhei sees himself standing on the edge of each one, watching someone’s childhood home get swallowed. Izuru must think highly of him because Shuuhei looks good in these memories.

At the very least, ghouls like Izuru aren’t violent. There’s no flash of blood and guts. The death is slow, and searing, and grueling. This is so much more a thorn in Shuuhei’s side than the little scenes that Renji creates.

“You are sentimental.” Izuru’s echoey voice is running water over Shuuhei’s head. His fingers dig into Shuuhei’s shoulders, under the creases of his shirt. “Sentimental for the idea of justice. But you need a break.”

“Angels don’t need breaks.”

“You aren’t an angel anymore.”

Man, that sure opened his eyes, Izuru. What a revelation. There’s a burning sensation on his back that isn’t Izuru. It starts at Shuuhei’s shoulder blades and reaches out into infinity, grasping for something that isn’t there anymore. It ends in a painful and jagged cut where bone was broken off.

Izuru’s stony touch brushes over it, and suddenly the ground is under Shuuhei’s feet again and he is away and untouchable. “Make sure you move out of here before you poison the place too much. This town is too nice, don’t ruin it.”

He doesn’t wait to hear Izuru’s indignant excuses at his back, and to sit through everyone else’s mistakes. Well, what he sees as their mistakes. But it’s not something they know how to turn off and on.


End file.
